Where did Change the Story / Change the World come from? How about a bad home, drugs, and prison. A predictable story? Sure, except when you throw in the National Cathedral Choir, a geodesic dome, and the stubborn belief that art can save the world. You never know!

In this episode we are going back to the beginning with the first episode of what was then a new podcast produced by the Center for the Study of Art & Community in 2020 called Change the Story, Change the World. In it I share the very personal story of how the show came to be and try to answer why would anybody want to listen.

It’s a journey of many decades. It begins in the leafy suburbs of our nation’s capital around the time that America started losing what some have called its innocence---Along the way we encounter hippie communes, the requisite drugs, sex and rock and roll, art colonies in prisons, and armies of artists doing battle with the likes of the Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot and the US Department of Justice. This week on Change the Story, Change the World, the story of how my story crosses paths with the early history and extraordinary growth of the global community arts movement.

THRESHOLD QUESTIONS AND DELICIOUS QUOTES

?Can the creative process be a lifeline for people who are struggling?  

"The pervasive, penetrating pulse of all that music was a god damn miracle, all at once a soothing balm, a shattering depth charge, and a transcendent window into other dimensions."

?Can art help us reimagine and recreate the social and cultural fabric of our communities?

"One of the bedrock understandings of the hippie universe was, to coin a phrase “you can’t always get what you want, but if you really need it, well, you can make it yourself.” So, in no time at all, we found ourselves imagining that we could make our OWN music.”

?What was CETA and how did it give birth to an ever-expanding community arts movement?

"The prison partnerships we forged … were both groundbreaking and challenging. They taught is a whole lot in a hurry about what artists need to do to build trust with new communities and neighborhood organizations."

? How can art help change the toxic nature of America’s prisons? 

"In those instants, we could see prison artists kind of tuning in, you know, moving from static to clear reception."

?How can these transformative stories feed the development of a growing community of creative change agents?

"By the end of the Art in Other Places Conference, we had a mountain of documentation on artists and programs from all over the country. We had made a commitment to NEA to produce … a report, but to really tell the story of what was going on we had to do more, much more."

?How can artists help re-build civic infrastructure, heal unspeakable trauma, and give new voice to the forgotten and disappeared?

"Art and Upheaval took me on an 8-year global journey, documenting artists working in communities facing intense, real-time conflict and trauma.”

?What is Change the Story / Change the World and why should anyone want to tune in?

"We are doing this because we believe that meeting the obvious and daunting challenges of this century is going to require a revolution of thought and deed — in essence, a new set of stories powerful enough to change beliefs and behaviors."

LINKS

• The Hangin' On, William Cleveland from Songlines, by Cleveland Plainsong
• Washington's Howard Theater played host to many of the great Black musical artists of the early and mid-twentieth centur was billed as the "Theater of the People."
• Fritz Perls, a German-born psychoanalyst Perls coined the term 'Gestalt therapy' to identify the form of psychotherapy that he developed with his wife, Laura Perls, in the 1940s and 1950s. Perls became associated with the Esalen Institute in 1964, and he lived there until 1969.
• CETA and the Arts (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) Here is an analysis of the impact of the U.S. Federal Government's largest annual investment in the arts.
• The William James Association's Prison Arts Project contracts with visual, literary and performing artists to provide in-depth, long-term arts experiences for incarcerated men and women in California state prison facilities.
• Art In Other Places: Artists at Work in America's Community & Social Institutions, William Cleveland
• Art and Upheaval: Artists on the Worlds Frontlines, William Cleveland

TRANSCRIPT

(Music) THE HANGIN ON

“The Hangin On” is probably the saddest song I’ve ever written. But its more complicated than that, because, you see, the unfortunate story it represents also precipitated its creation. So, for me, it’s also a song of redemption, one of many that have emerged over the years that have both taught me, first-hand, about the healing power of human creativity and, to put it bluntly, probably saved my life. 

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community this is Change the Story, Change the World, A Chronicle of Art and Transformation. I’m Bill Cleveland. 

 Bad home, Drugs, rock and roll, prison. A not uncommon and fairly predictable trajectory, but not really, especially when you throw in the National Cathedral choir, a geodesic dome, and the stubborn belief that art can save the world. You’ve tuned in to the first episode of Change the Story Change the World. In this first chapter we share a very personal and, no doubt highly biased account of how I came to believe that assertion with all my heart and soul.

It’s a journey of many decades. It begins in the leafy suburbs of our nation’s capital around the time that America started losing what some have called its innocence---Along the way we will encounter hippie communes, the requisite drugs, sex and rock and roll, art colonies in prisons, and armies of artists doing battle with = the likes of the Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot and the US Department of Justice. This Change the Story, Change the World, I share how my story crosses paths with the early history and extraordinary growth of the global community arts movement. 

Part 1

I’m a lucky man. Lucky and incredibly fortunate. To be sure I am a white guy who grew up in the suburbs with good public schools and a swimming pool down the street. All obvious markers of middle-class white privilege in post WW II America. But no, what proved to be the real impetus for what I now think of as a charmed life, came from a different, less obvious place. A place that has much more to do with survival than the silver spoon.

You see, the story unfolding in the Cleveland house was, like too many others I came to know, not what it seemed. My brother, sister and I grew up in a in a slow-moving nightmare born of my parents making what some folks call bad choices and I call just doing bad shit when they drank too much, particularly my dad.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my parents, and they taught me a lot, but, sometimes bad is just bad. The obvious antidote was, of course, to split as soon as possible. So, as we came of age, the three of us, ran in different directions. Predictably, the compass for my own escape, pointed, well--- due nowhere. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate, my one-way ticket was stamped Forgetsville which is just north of nowhere.

The fuel for this journey came from what I knew best from my time in our suburban fun house. Some call it dissipation, I call it oblivion. Oblivion in search of the numb or to be brutally honest just plain dumb. As dumb as imagining that my escape route was in the vanguard of an new social revolution, totally unaware of the ugly truth that my future had been hijacked by the only movie I had ever known – a script with the most obvious and predictable plot line in the book—Namely, if it hurts just do whatever it takes to make it go away, at least for now. And there’s no denying that us hippies were really into the NOW.

The general pattern of this version of freakdom was pretty simple—essentially, hanging out, getting wrecked and chowing down. Different days in different ways but inevitably ending up a little bit behind, where you started. Surprisingly, my headlong embrace of this flight-no fight treadmill also pointed me in the direction of what I have come to know of as the promised land. This was also the path that led to my lifelong obsession with the power of stories. This is because these episodes of stupor and gluttony also included heavy doses soul, blues, acid rock, metal, country, R&B, gospel, folk, and whatever else was being channeled through those old car radios, thrift store stereo’s --- blasting out and through in continuous waves of one exhilarating, liberating, sonic groove marvel after another.

I had always been beguiled by music. In fact, when I was in the third grade my mother took note of this and had me tryout for the National Cathedral Boys Choir. I’d like to say that getting in proved to be my immediate salvation but like many things in life, the benefits of boy choirdom showed up much later. At the time, though, I hated it. I hated the three-day-a week rehearsals, and two-hour Sunday services, I hated the purple vestments with the cute white collars. Most of all, I hated not having time to play baseball with my buds, which I did the minute my voice started to change. 

Like I said, that music fever really hit me after I put high school and home in my rear-view mirror. It was about this time when my friends Alan, Arthur and I started making regular visits to the Howard Theater, D.C.’s version of the Apollo. I suppose you could say my latent condition was severely aggravated from repeated exposure to Otis, Marvin, Smoky, and the Marvelettes sweating and shakeing on that stage. Whatever it was, it was a passion of a different order. Why, then I don’t know, maybe it was the perfect medicine for the moment. But, as far as I was concerned the pervasive, penetrating pulse of all that music was a god damn miracle, all at once a soothing balm, a shattering depth charge and a transcendent window into other dimensions. A place to go, here and not here all at once, where I could bathe in the funk and flash of someone else’s story – It was amazing, not so much that it took me completely out of my stupor. That’s not how this story goes. but It certainly planted a seed.

Now if you are still with me you may be thinking hey this is supposed to be a show about the power of stories to change the way we think and act, which I am assuming you were thinking might be somewhat uplifting. So, at this point I want to reassure you that its coming—

Part Two

After a crash and burn interlude at the University of Maryland and some unfortunate encounters with the criminal justice and the mental health systems my luck, most definitely fortified by birth privilege, (which gave me lots of do-overs) seemed to re-emerge north of Toronto Canada at a falling down farm that we called Buckhorn Center. Buckhorn was community of I guess what you’d call helping professionals and fellow travelers, like me, following in the path of freaky psychoanalyst named Fritz Perls. Dr. Perls, new age thing was referred to as Gestalt. Which means, you or we, are more than just the some of our parts. The basic aim was helping troubled people move from broken to whole. 

This made sense to me because I was definitely in need of serious rebuilding. At first Buckhorn was a personal refuge, but eventually it became my family and a kind of celebratory healing place for lots of folks who came there.  Back then, the neighboring farmers called it a gad damn hippie commune. I called it home. 

Buckhorn was a community of helpers, makers, growers, and, most importantly builders. Early on, our first order of business was getting the place habitable, so we set to fixing and building – A rock wall, a garden, an outhouse for two, a big round dining room table for 16, a performance space, and a geodesic dome, painted orange, all in the short interlude between the melting snows of March and the first flakes of October, 1972. Needless to say, that first year, It was all hands, in the dirt and build, build, build -- no time for pondering, wallowing or bitching.

I loved it. This was just the place I needed for funky seeds of my re-entry to find the soil and water and air needed to sprout and flower and fruit, and surprise, surprise, seed again, and again, spreading roots, and shoots, grabbing hold of whatever would help me make some sense and meaning of my upside down world.

And that was pretty much the deal, for the 8 of us that stuck it out through the winter. The sense and substance that we all craved, was, of course, in all that making. Making and sharing. Taking the rocks and building a wall, together. Planting the seeds and growing the zucchini, and corn and tomatoes together. Harvesting the bounty and feasting, as a family together and, of course when the electricity was flowing cranking up the stereo and boogieing together. 

Now, one of the bedrock understandings of the hippie universe was, to coin a phrase “you can’t always get what you want, but if you really need it, well, you can make it yourself.” So, in no time at all, we found ourselves imagining that we could make our OWN music. 

For me this translated to long stretches with pen and paper, stealing, imagining procuring, discovering words and rhymes every time I found myself with an idle moment. Not that l all those songs of were worth a hill of beans. But, being lost in that world was an amazing deliverance from the underworld I was crawling out of. The coolest thing was that I was driving the magic bus, no, actually I owned that bus and no one could take it away.

The great part though was that I was NOT alone on this journey. Far from it, because, each evening Marty, and Arthur, and Didy and I would gather in that big orange dome, humming a tune, connecting the rhymes, and the stories, with the chords, harmonies, and beats rising up, and making that music together, our music, and our story coming alive in the songs, over and over, and over. Like I said, the community we were building was called Buckhorn, so was the band. 

Like many good things, Buckhorn, the healing place and the band came and went. But the legacy, and the lessons, left a taste that would not fade. Like I said, for me it was akin to an addiction. I had come up there caught in a stupid, vicious circle, snake eating its tail, story. Getting my hands dirty, sharing responsibility, and the two-hole outhouse, becoming a maker, and a partner had smashed that narrative to smithereens. And, you know, as hard as I tried, I just couldn’t put that poor me, pity party back together. I was stuck with a new saga. And that was it. Change the Story, Change the World. – my world at least. 

Part Three

It’s the spring of 85. I am standing next to three pottery wheels in the corner of what used to be storage closet in the bowels of a place called the California Medical Facility. Although it sounds like a hospital CMF is actually a prison with a few bits and pieces of hospital thrown in for sick prisoners. My path here has been circuitous with one constant. Music, lots songs and bands birthed and forgotten, lots of late nights, crumby bars and free beer, but also odd jobs, like house painting, and newspaper delivery, cause, well, you know, you have to eat. 

There was also a weird job with the city of Sacramento called CETA ARTS that was hiring artists to work in unlikely places like senior centers, parks, public housing, and well, the Sacramento County Jail. Amazingly, It was funded by the US Department of Labor. CETA, that’s C, E, T. A, or Comprehensive Employment and Training Act was actually a national jobs program. Hiring artists was not the intention, but lots of them were jobless and it did – to the tune of $300 million a year. Which was and still is America’s largest public investment in the arts. 

It affected hundreds of thousands of people in and out of the arts. Here’s some of them talking about their experience in a 1970’s Department of Labor Documentary on the program. 

The disembodied voice of the Federal government notwithstanding, the partnerships we forged in Sacramento were both groundbreaking and challenging. They taught is a whole lot in a hurry about what artists need to do to build trust with new communities and neighborhood organizations.

To be sure CETA was serious work. But we also kept it playful. At one point someone suggested we needed a CETA song. Here is what we came up with. 

CETA, Oh my CETA, So completa', your so sweeta'

You done me good, you done me good

Anyways that strange gig, somehow landed me, so to speak, in prison., newly hired as the head of something called Arts in Corrections. The idea was pretty simple. Idle inmates, as the prisoners are called, mixed with overcrowding made for trouble. So, give them something to do. The art part the inspiration of a force of nature, named Eloise Smith who, given her extraordinary political savvy and influence, pretty much compelled the California Department of Corrections let her organization, The William James Association set up shop at CMF (California Medical Facility)

So, there I was with a team of 5 teaching artists who, at the time didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about the complex and brutal netherworld that surrounded our closet of a studio, but we did know a few things about art making. One of those “things” was that our students were getting turned on. Literally. And They just loved it, we loved it. But...

Bonus: Change the Story Genesis

(Music) THE HANGIN ON

“The Hangin On” is probably the saddest song I’ve ever written. But its more complicated than that, because, you see, the unfortunate story it represents also precipitated its creation. So, for me, it’s also a song of redemption, one of many that have emerged over the years that have both taught me, first-hand, about the healing power of human creativity and, to put it bluntly, probably saved my life.

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community this is Change the Story, Change the World, A Chronicle of Art and Transformation. I’m Bill Cleveland.

Bad home, Drugs, rock and roll, prison. A not uncommon and fairly predictable trajectory, but not really, especially when you throw in the National Cathedral choir, a geodesic dome, and the stubborn belief that art can save the world. You’ve tuned in to the first episode of Change the Story Change the World. In this first chapter we share a very personal and, no doubt highly biased account of how I came to believe that assertion with all my heart and soul.

It’s a journey of many decades. It begins in the leafy suburbs of our nation’s capital around the time that America started losing what some have called its innocence---Along the way we will encounter hippie communes, the requisite drugs, sex and rock and roll, art colonies in prisons, and armies of artists doing battle with = the likes of the Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot and the US Department of Justice. This Change the Story, Change the World, I share how my story crosses paths with the early history and extraordinary growth of the global community arts movement.

Part 1

I’m a lucky man. Lucky and incredibly fortunate. To be sure I am a white guy who grew up in the suburbs with good public schools and a swimming pool down the street. All obvious markers of middle-class white privilege in post WW II America. But no, what proved to be the real impetus for what I now think of as a charmed life, came from a different, less obvious place. A place that has much more to do with survival than the silver spoon.

You see, the story unfolding in the Cleveland house was, like too many others I came to know, not what it seemed. My brother, sister and I grew up in a in a slow-moving nightmare born of my parents making what some folks call bad choices and I call just doing bad shit when they drank too much, particularly my dad.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my parents, and they taught me a lot, but, sometimes bad is just bad. The obvious antidote was, of course, to split as soon as possible. So, as we came of age, the three of us, ran in different directions. Predictably, the compass for my own escape, pointed, well--- due nowhere. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate, my one-way ticket was stamped Forgetsville which is just north of nowhere.

The fuel for this journey came from what I knew best from my time in our suburban fun house. Some call it dissipation, I call it oblivion. Oblivion in search of the numb or to be brutally honest just plain dumb. As dumb as imagining that my escape route was in the vanguard of an new social revolution, totally unaware of the ugly truth that my future had been hijacked by the only movie I had ever known – a script with the most obvious and predictable plot line in the book—Namely, if it hurts just do whatever it takes to make it go away, at least for now. And there’s no denying that us hippies were really into the NOW.

The general pattern of this version of freakdom was pretty simple—essentially, hanging out, getting wrecked and chowing down. Different days in different ways but inevitably ending up a little bit behind, where you started. Surprisingly, my headlong embrace of this flight-no fight treadmill also pointed me in the direction of what I have come to know of as the promised land. This was also the path that led to my lifelong obsession with the power of stories. This is because these episodes of stupor and gluttony also included heavy doses soul, blues, acid rock, metal, country, R&B, gospel, folk, and whatever else was being channeled through those old car radios, thrift store stereo’s --- blasting out and through in continuous waves of one exhilarating, liberating, sonic groove marvel after another.

I had always been beguiled by music. In fact, when I was in the third grade my mother took note of this and had me tryout for the National Cathedral Boys Choir. I’d like to say that getting in proved to be my immediate salvation but like many things in life, the benefits of boy choirdom showed up much later. At the time, though, I hated it. I hated the three-day-a week rehearsals, and two-hour Sunday services, I hated the purple vestments with the cute white collars. Most of all, I hated not having time to play baseball with my buds, which I did the minute my voice started to change.

Like I said, that music fever really hit me after I put high school and home in my rear-view mirror. It was about this time when my friends Alan, Arthur and I started making regular visits to the Howard Theater, D.C.’s version of the Apollo. I suppose you could say my latent condition was severely aggravated from repeated exposure to Otis, Marvin, Smoky, and the Marvelettes sweating and shakeing on that stage. Whatever it was, it was a passion of a different order. Why, then I don’t know, maybe it was the perfect medicine for the moment. But, as far as I was concerned the pervasive, penetrating pulse of all that music was a god damn miracle, all at once a soothing balm, a shattering depth charge and a transcendent window into other dimensions. A place to go, here and not here all at once, where I could bathe in the funk and flash of someone else’s story – It was amazing, not so much that it took me completely out of my stupor. That’s not how this story goes. but It certainly planted a seed.

Now if you are still with me you may be thinking hey this is supposed to be a show about the power of stories to change the way we think and act, which I am assuming you were thinking might be somewhat uplifting. So, at this point I want to reassure you that its coming—

Part Two

After a crash and burn interlude at the University of Maryland and some unfortunate encounters with the criminal justice and the mental health systems my luck, most definitely fortified by birth privilege, (which gave me lots of do-overs) seemed to re-emerge north of Toronto Canada at a falling down farm that we called Buckhorn Center. Buckhorn was community of I guess what you’d call helping professionals and fellow travelers, like me, following in the path of freaky psychoanalyst named Fritz Perls. Dr. Perls, new age thing was referred to as Gestalt. Which means, you or we, are more than just the some of our parts. The basic aim was helping troubled people move from broken to whole.

This made sense to me because I was definitely in need of serious rebuilding. At first Buckhorn was a personal refuge, but eventually it became my family and a kind of celebratory healing place for lots of folks who came there. Back then, the neighboring farmers called it a gad damn hippie commune. I called it home.

I loved it. This was just the place I needed for funky seeds of my re-entry to find the soil and water and air needed to sprout and flower and fruit, and surprise, surprise, seed again, and again, spreading roots, and shoots, grabbing hold of whatever would help me make some sense and meaning of my upside down world.

And that was pretty much the deal, for the 8 of us that stuck it out through the winter. The sense and substance that we all craved, was, of course, in all that making. Making and sharing. Taking the rocks and building a wall, together. Planting the seeds and growing the zucchini, and corn and tomatoes together. Harvesting the bounty and feasting, as a family together and, of course when the electricity was flowing cranking up the stereo and boogieing together.

Now, one of the bedrock understandings of the hippie universe was, to coin a phrase “you can’t always get what you want, but if you really need it, well, you can make it yourself.” So, in no time at all, we found ourselves imagining that we could make our OWN music.

For me this translated to long stretches with pen and paper, stealing, imagining procuring, discovering words and rhymes every time I found myself with an idle moment. Not that l all those songs of were worth a hill of beans. But, being lost in that world was an amazing deliverance from the underworld I was crawling out of. The coolest thing was that I was driving the magic bus, no, actually I owned that bus and no one could take it away.

The great part though was that I was NOT alone on this journey. Far from it, because, each evening Marty, and Arthur, and Didy and I would gather in that big orange dome, humming a tune, connecting the rhymes, and the stories, with the chords, harmonies, and beats rising up, and making that music together, our music, and our story coming alive in the songs, over and over, and over. Like I said, the community we were building was called Buckhorn, so was the band.

Like many good things, Buckhorn, the healing place and the band came and went. But the legacy, and the lessons, left a taste that would not fade. Like I said, for me it was akin to an addiction. I had come up there caught in a stupid, vicious circle, snake eating its tail, story. Getting my hands dirty, sharing responsibility, and the two-hole outhouse, becoming a maker, and a partner had smashed that narrative to smithereens. And, you know, as hard as I tried, I just couldn’t put that poor me, pity party back together. I was stuck with a new saga. And that was it. Change the Story, Change the World. – my world at least.

Part Three

It’s the spring of 85. I am standing next to three pottery wheels in the corner of what used to be storage closet in the bowels of a place called the California Medical Facility. Although it sounds like a hospital CMF is actually a prison with a few bits and pieces of hospital thrown in for sick prisoners. My path here has been circuitous with one constant. Music, lots songs and bands birthed and forgotten, lots of late nights, crumby bars and free beer, but also odd jobs, like house painting, and newspaper delivery, cause, well, you know, you have to eat.

There was also a weird job with the city of Sacramento called CETA ARTS that was hiring artists to work in unlikely places like senior centers, parks, public housing, and well, the Sacramento County Jail. Amazingly, It was funded by the US Department of Labor. CETA, that’s C, E, T. A, or Comprehensive Employment and Training Act was actually a national jobs program. Hiring artists was not the intention, but lots of them were jobless and it did – to the tune of $300 million a year. Which was and still is America’s largest public investment in the arts.

The disembodied voice of the Federal government notwithstanding, the partnerships we forged in Sacramento were both groundbreaking and challenging. They taught is a whole lot in a hurry about what artists need to do to build trust with new communities and neighborhood organizations.

To be sure CETA was serious work. But we also kept it playful. At one point someone suggested we needed a CETA song. Here is what we came up with.

CETA, Oh my CETA, So completa', your so sweeta'

You done me good, you done me good

Anyways that strange gig, somehow landed me, so to speak, in prison., newly hired as the head of something called Arts in Corrections. The idea was pretty simple. Idle inmates, as the prisoners are called, mixed with overcrowding made for trouble. So, give them something to do. The art part the inspiration of a force of nature, named Eloise Smith who, given her extraordinary political savvy and influence, pretty much compelled the California Department of Corrections let her organization, The William James Association set up shop at CMF (California Medical Facility)

So, there I was with a team of 5 teaching artists who, at the time didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about the complex and brutal netherworld that surrounded our closet of a studio, but we did know a few things about art making. One of those “things” was that our students were getting turned on. Literally. And They just loved it, we loved it. But this was not some woo-woo, artsy magic here. These were the kinds of breakthroughs all of us had experienced in some way in our own growth as artists.

For me it was like Buckhorn, when my clumsy efforts of music making started giving way to muscle memory and it just started to flow. In those instants, we could see prison artists kind of tuning in, you know, moving from static to clear reception. Like when one of our guitar students, said “whoa, stuff just happens, all by itself.” And the actor who described himself as being so “inside” his character that he forgot where he was, and the songwriter who came to us with complete songs, that he had dreamed the night before.

In that tiny clay studio, a Vacaville lifer, named Marcus was looking that moment in a spinning lump of wet clay that he had been struggling to “center” on a rotating head of an old-school kick wheel. There was no doubt he was into it, but I could see that it hadn’t been going well. He was tense, sweating, pressing in on the clay. Hunched over, with his hands together, he looked like someone praying really hard. It was too hard, though. He had been told not to manhandle the thing, but every time it started to wobble his muscles flexed, with predictable results. He was not smiling, when he glanced up at Jerry, our ceramics instructor. Jerry place a hand on Marcus’ shoulder.

“You’re doing fine. Just relax, it’ll come along.”

Marcus shook his head, “Easy for you to say.”

This was Marcus’ fourth visit to the studio. So far, he had been frustrated. It was obvious he thought it would be a snap. He said as much after watching Jerry throw a perfect little bowl in a few minutes. And this morning he announced to us that was why he was back,” to get that thing to happen for ME” But it was not going according to plan, and he looked really tired.

This was not a not necessarily a bad thing. As his kicking slowed, he seemed to reset, recognizing this was going to be a different a kind of work than he was used to. Not heavy and hard. No, what was going to turn that spinning thing into a pot was an almost unnatural combination of purpose and letting go, an in-between pressing and releasing that was equal parts mind and muscle.

As he moved his hands inward the mound, slowly began to rise. He seemed surprised and it was obvious that he was trying to stay cool. It was working, but he knew he could lose it any moment. Just like he’d seen Jerry doing the day before, he pushed his thumbs down into the whirling muck, trying to keep the inside and outside in tune and In that instant a simple bowl found its form. As his kicking rhythm slowed, a deep moan seemed to rise up from the space between his hunching form and the bottom of a newly born pot. Marcus’ of truth had arrived. His story had shifted, a little. A prisoner had become a potter. Later he described what it felt like in Eric Theirmann’s Academy Award nominated documentary Art and the Prison Crises.

Over the next decade these instances played out over and over in prisons all over California. By the time I left the program in the middle 90’s, 10,000 prison artists were making pots, and paintings, and songs, and plays, dances and even movies in every prison in the state. Research showed that were helping to slow the revolving door that characterized the California prison experience. That was the good news. The bad news was that as a result of the state’s prison unconscionable prison building explosion our program had expanded from 12 to 28 institutions.

Part Four:

Prisons are generally located in out of the way places. As you can imagine Art in prison is kind of an oddity, so every once in a while, I would get invited have lunch and tell stories at one of the small-town Rotary clubs near the prisons. Needless to say, these were skeptical folks.

I would usually introduce myself as an ambassador from another planet. I described my planet as A place where truth, beauty, trust, excellence, tenderness, responsibility, vulnerability, color, sensitivity, choice, companion ship, cooperation, and physical contact had been banished. I said living there was like running a marathon in 100-degree heat with no water. By mile 26, if you survive, cut off from all these things (I just listed) that we take for granted, your soul is pretty much sucked dry. I also reminded them that as citizens of CA (at that time) we were investing around $4 billion a year in this planetary system and that 95 percent of these parched prisoners would ultimately be returning to earth to live in their communities. Then I described what happens when these dried-up souls get seriously hydrated- In other words, I shared what happens when a prisoner becomes addicted to art.

I followed this with a quote from James Rowland the notoriously hard-nosed Director of Corrections, Rowland said.

“Mastering arts skills requires patience, self-discipline, and long-term commitment. These attributes are basic to an inmate’s ability to function responsibly upon release.…Through programs like Arts-In-Corrections we have a greater chance of making a productive citizen out of a probable repeat offender, with fewer crimes, and fewer victims we all win.”

That generally got their attention.

With encounters like this, my prison gig turned out to be much more than just an inside job. It also introduced me to many hundreds of under the radar of artists working to make change in places art schools and conservatories never imagined their graduates would be earning their keep –Places -like hospitals, senior centers, housing projects, youth programs, and, of course jails and prisons all over.

Sometime near the middle of my Corrections adventure, one of my partners in crime, Susan Hill called me with an intriguing idea. Susan ran one of our partner programs called ArtsReach, at UCLA. She said, you know, there’s a program at the National Endowment for the Arts, that supports conferences. I think it’s time we had one if those.

My skeptical self said, “On prison art?”

“Yea”, she said, “That and more, much more. How bout, a conference for artists working in all the invisible “other” places out there across the country?”

It was also incredibly informative. By that I mean, that really, we had no idea, what had been going on out there in the hidden corners of the art and community world. From what we could tell It appeared that all the energy and learning that had been unleashed by the big, but short lived Dept of Labor, CETA explosion had planted seeds all across the country that were now bearing fruit. Lots of fruit. So now, after 5 years, this unplanned, serendipitous government investment in artists working in communities and social institutions had spawned what was now looking like a movement.

By the end of our UCLA gathering, we had collected a mountain of documentation on artists and programs from all over the country. We had photos, video, reports, research, and most importantly we had lots artists stories on tape. It was a treasure trove. We had made a commitment to NEA to produce some kind of a report, but we knew, to really tell the story of what was going on out there we had to do more, much more.

The name of the book was that emerged was, surprise, surprise, Art in Other Places. With a subtitle, Artists at Work In America’s Community and Social institutions. It featured 22 artists telling stories about their work with hospital patients, prisoners, the elderly, disabled persons, people with mental illness, and others. Although it took me three years to write it, I think it helped make this extraordinary work a little more visible.

After I left Corrections, I bought a tie got my bureaucratic chops together running an outfit called California State Summer School for the Arts and directing the Walker Art Center’s Education Department. I also started a little side project with some colleagues that eventually became the main event. We called it the Center for the Study of Art and Community. That’s a mouthful to be sure but it had a pretty simple mission. Which was basically, to continue telling the amazing stories of artists working to build caring, capable and equitable communities.

Over the past couple of decades, the Center has done just that producing research, and case studies, articles and books on arts-based community development and social change efforts all over the world. One project called Art and Upheaval took me on an 8-year global journey, documenting artists working in communities facing intense, real-time conflict and trauma. The book we produced includes stories of artists making change in some very hard places: working with youth in post Keymer Rouge Cambodia: pushing back and eventually winning against Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic; rebuilding community in Watts California and struggling for peace in the final years of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

As I said up front, from my perspective, Change the Story, Change the World is not hyperbole. It’s something I have come to know from my own experience and the work of the hundreds of transformative makers I have been privileged to count as colleagues and friends. My main work as an educator, documenter, advocate and artist has always been to spread, not only the good word, but also the ingenious, sometimes, surprising, tools and strategies embodied in the art and social change story.

This podcast will continue down that path. Some of what we will be sharing, will dip back into those other places, like prisons, hospitals, neighborhood centers, and alternative schools. Others will take us to communities where different histories, cultures, and circumstances provide completely new contextual lenses for exploring and understanding the power of human creativity to transform. Along the way we’ll hear from some of my heroes. Like John Bergman who has probably worked in more prisons than anybody in this country in or out of the arts. And Lily Yeh, the visionary founder of Philadelphia’s, Village of Arts and Humanities and Barefoot Artists. We’ll tap into the wisdom of colleagues like and psychologist, songwriter, visual artist Barry Marcus —who pioneered something he calls “creative culture” as a powerful driver for youth development. And Mary Cohen whose prison choirs bring beauty to the ugliest corners of the world. We’ll also hear from creative chess masters like Eric Takeshita who has placed his talents as an artist, teacher, policy maker and philanthropist in service to equitable change. And Leni Sloan, an activist/performer/empresario and historian, whose entire career has unfolded like a social change musical—.

So that’s what we are up to. When I say we, I’m pointing to all the partners who make this little experiment possible. We are doing this because we believe that meeting the obvious and daunting challenges of this century is going to require a revolution of thought and deed — in essence, a new set of stories powerful enough to change beliefs and behaviors.

We are also doing it with the recognition that Change the Story, Change the World is not a one-way street to healing, and reconciliation, and transformation. If history teaches us anything, it’s that powerful stories can also be used to disrupt, disrupt and destroy. So, from time to time, we will be exploring this dark side as well.

In the end, our aim is to inform and Yes, entertain, but we also hope that each episode will contribute a thread or two to your own evolving story as you make your own way in the second line procession of our ever-changing world. We hope you will Join us for the next episode of Change the Story, Change the World.

Before we sign off, we’d like to thank our partners for this episode past and present, particularly my mentors Verne McKee, Warren Robinson, and Carla Cleveland. Buckhorn family members Brenda Pellier and Ingrid Robinson, bandmates Marty Cohen, Diane Pellier, Arthur Cohen and Alan Freedman, Partners in crime Susan Hill, Leni Sloan and Barry Marcus, my sibs, Casey and Nonny and All the folks at the William James Association.

Change the Story Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art & Community, it is written and directed by Bill Cleveland, our theme music and sound scape is composed by Judy Munson. We invite you to join the conversation, check out show notes and learn more about the Center, at artandcommunity.com.